Novel synthesis and characterization of activated carbon fiber and dye adsorption modeling Original Research Article

The main objective of this work is to prepare activated carbon fibers (ACF), analyze a synthesis mechanism of those fibers, and develop a new dye adsorption model. The surface chemical structures of the synthesized viscose rayon phosphates and ACF were analyzed using TOF–SIMS and ATR FT-IR. After steam-activation of carbon fiber at high temperature, the carboxyl group could not be observed due to the high temperature activation. Only the oxygen-contained carbon ring groups appeared. The adsorption mechanism of the developed model in this study, the bottle-neck model, was simple to understand and apply to the industrial adsorption plants. The model could predict theoretical concentration versus time or dye concentration in an ultra accurate manner in the medium and low concentration regions, which could not previously be attempted by other models.